Deniers down under are promoting a new video from the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian denial shop funded by Gina Rinehart, the country’s richest person thanks to her mining company.
The 13-minute video, titled “Beige Reef,” depicts Dr. Jennifer Marahosey’s trip to a coral reef in order to let people “see for themselves that claims that the Great Barrier Reef is in crisis are not true.”
They describe the video as a rebuttal to a 2016 Nature paper (which is actually published by Nature’s Scientific Reports imprint) that compared the condition of a couple small reefs in 2012 with photos from 1994 and 1890. These reefs, it’s important to note, are on the coast, and is not part of the further-out Great Barrier Reef. That these are small, isolated coastal reefs and not at all part of the GBF ecosystem belies the claim in the very first sentence of IPA’s YouTube description that this video proves the Great Barrier Reef isn’t in crisis.
That minor sleight-of-hand aside, does the video actually debunk the paper?
It does not. The video’s premise is that the Nature (Scientific Reports) paper claims all of a particular coral reef is dead, and therefore any living coral would debunk it. But that’s not even remotely what the paper says.
As far as Marahosey and IPA are concerned, the part of the study they’re rebutting, or at least the only part they feel comfortable sharing with the audience, is this quote: “In the late 19th and early 20th Century, historical photographs revealed large and abundant living tabular Acropora sp. and massive faviid colonies at Bramston Reef… by contrast in 1994, no living Acropora colonies were found at either location and the majority of the large faviids that featured so prominently at Bramston Reef in c. 1890 were dead, covered in algae and/or mud.”
So none were found in 1994, but some were found in 2019. Does this mean that the study is somehow wrong?
No. It simply means that, as the abstract of the study says, “evidence of some recovery was found” in one area, but “in contrast, very little sign of coral re-establishment was found at Stone Island suggesting delayed recovery.”
So the abstract itself points to the recovery, albeit delayed, of these once-dead coral. The study also says quite clearly, and in multiple places, that despite the fact that there were a lot of dead corals, living colonies were also present, and the Acropora colonies that weren’t there in 1994 had returned by 2012 (though not to the extent that they were in 1890).
Meaning Marahosey hasn’t debunked the study so much as focused on the few living coral that the study itself acknowledges are still around.
On top of that, there’s the fact that the video is being presented as debunking concerns about climate change (and ocean acidification) bleaching the Great Barrier Reef, when the paper itself found that it was a storm and flood event that killed the reef (which again, isn’t part of the Great Barrier Reef).
All the video proves, then, is that it’s apparently pretty easy to get a coral snorkeling trip paid for by rich Australians, so long as they don’t mind that your debunking of a Nature study actually confirms its findings!
Edit: The paper was actually published by Nature’s Scientific Reports imprint, not Nature itself, as pointed out in a Guardian piece where the paper’s authors describe how Marahosey misrepresents their work.
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